shacochis part 4

Summer 2008 Issue
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I hear mutterings these days, which I don’t quite understand, about the demise or, less dire, failings of New Journalism. Nope. Sorry. Wrong. There’s nothing of substance that’s new about New Journalism, which is a tag that appeared in the 1960s when iconoclast correspondents began to assimilate the counterculture into the ironic hipness and psychedelic crackle of their prose—a change in stylistics, not core principles (bell bottoms were still pants, after all, and “new” only in their mass appeal). Journalism that is narrative-based and a good faith practitioner of what, throughout the millennia, evolved into what we commonly call fictional techniques–character development, dramatic arc, linguistic dexterity and texture, an operative aesthetic (anathema to strict reportage), authorial voice or presence (subjectivity)–has been around forever–Gilgamesh and the flood; Homer and the Trojans; Thucydides and the Roman conquests–and arrives in North America with the likes of Captain John Smith, Lewis and Clark, the Harper’s correspondents who reported on the Civil War, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, A.J. Liebling and H.L. Mencken, smashing into a rather locked-down First Amendment with the gate-crashing words of Lenny Bruce, Henry Miller, J.P. Donleavy, on and onward to the names you know from the post-modern era, the impresarios of New Journalism, only a few who had much of an influence on me, or who navigated me in some radical or entirely innovative direction away from the rich and varied traditions of their predecessors.

I hear mutterings these days, which I don't quite understand, about the demise or, less dire, failings of New Journalism. Nope. Sorry. Wrong.

I joined the staff of my high school newspaper because there was a girl already on it I wanted to court. But I had already been courted myself, successfully, by journalism, thanks to The Washington Post, or rather The Washington Post as it existed in the 1960s, under the stewardship of the legendary Ben Bradlee, when I was growing up in the D.C. metropolitan suburbs of McLean, Va. Before walking five blocks down the road to school, every morning at breakfast I would read The Post avidly, the front section of course, because the events being reported were always astounding, but especially Bradlee’s new and improved Style section, and the delicious accounts of life on the planet as articulated by a trio of young female feature writers recently hired–Sally Quinn, Judy Bachrach, Judith Martin–and serious wordsmiths like Curt Suplee, whom I fantasized one day might profile me. Add to that crew Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night), William Buckley, and Gore Vidal (who cares that they existed at the opposite ends of the political spectrum–the intensity of their love of language was mesmerizing), and the young Hunter Thompson who immersed himself into the world of the Hell’s Angels, plus Tom Wolfe’s explosions of language into his subjects (cars, LSD, white liberals cozying up to black militants) and you arrive at a pretty reliable set of ingredients for a recipe on How To Cook A Young Writer, circa the ‘60s.

Most importantly, it’s germane to the present moment to understand New Journalism as–

...to give some thought to-

Hold on. Did I mention that my wife back there in sunny Tallahassee told me I shouldn’t, couldn’t, come back home until I finished my stinking novel? That was 11 months ago. No, strike that, it was 12, and I’m looking down the road at six or seven more before I can again taste the salty divinity of an Apalachicola oyster, raw and by the dozen.

All right. I’ll get back to you on that. Promise. Maybe.

Excuse me. I need another cup of coffee, I am going to light another cigarette, and I am going to sink back into the vast, echoing underworld of my book.

Did I say already the novel is set—foolishly, in my opinion—on three different continents, with four separate but interlocking chronologies, each backdropped by a different war, with I think more than 10 but I’m sure less than 50 characters (it’s not that I’ve forgotten the number—I’ve never actually counted them). Have I bragged that I am now on page 456? Did I choke when I told you I suspect I have about 400 pages more to write?

Did I mention any of this? None of it? I can smell springtime up here in the alpine air and it’s making me, I must admit, a bit squirrelly.

SOS. SOS.

Send women, guns and money.

Bob Shacochis is still working on his book, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, to be published in 2009 (or 2010, or 2051 on his 100th birthday).

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